Geocities Calls it Quits – HostGator to the Rescue

HostGator is napping up new customers from the demise of GeoCities by promising ‘to try sending some free months of web hosting’ for anyone that wants to switch hosts.

Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities on October 26 after buying the site for $3.57 billion in 1999 from a small hosting company called Beverley Hills Internet. Beverley Hills launched GeoCities in 1995 with the business model of free hosting and a limited site-building tool supported by online advertising.

GeoCities was once home to millions of web users, but has fallen on tough times as new social networking applications like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo have come to the fore.

Easy to manage and configurable site building tools like WordPress and other blogging software have also contributed to the fall of GeoCities.

The fact is that the web has finally come of age and unfortunately free social services like GeoCities just can’t compete in a sector where corporations need to squeeze a profit for their shareholders.

HostGator is an example of a profitable web business – recently breaking the 200,000-customer threshold and on course to hit the 300,000 mark within a year – with some smart marketing moves like the offer to GeoCities devotees and competitively priced hosting packages.

To apply for the HostGator offer, post a comment on their blog about GeoCities closing – to date the blog has just the one comment, that is probably more of a statement about GeoCities’ sorry status than anything else.

ZDNet Rupert Goodwins website editor said “I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet. It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet.”

The GeoCities name will live on as Internet Archive has indexed a lot of GeoCities sites.

“GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the web for almost 15 years,” said an Internet Archive spokesman,

The closure of GeoCities is part of a continuing overhaul of Yahoo! as a business as the company tries to make up lost ground in the search wars with Google.

This year alone, Yahoo has announced 5% of a global 13,600 workers would lose their jobs and that operations would focus on moneymaking services like news and search.

Perhaps Yahoo! faces the same problems as GeoCities – people don’t search the web, they ‘Google’ it, so the brand has become synonymous with the activity.

Links

• HostGator Official Website
• HostGator Coupon Codes
• HostGator Review